How do you respond to the call for sustainable solutions in the rubber industry? Is it via bio-sourced polymers or fillers? elimination of carcinogenic additives from the compound? Inclusion of recycled content in the material? light-weighting aimed at reducing material use or at fuel economy improvements? supply of critical components to EVs?
There are many paths to sustainability, but they are all constrained by these three filters:
- Most alternatives risk a reduction in durability (despite the optimistic claims of suppliers).
- Your product still must pass its durability qualification requirements.
- The number of development iterations is severely limited by the time and cost of durability testing.
Endurica workflows have been driving a “right the first time” engineering culture for the last 14 years. Putting durability characterization and simulation upfront in your development programs means that you find and resolve issues earlier and cheaper than if you depended only on your qualification to discover issues.
With Endurica, you can rapidly evaluate the durability of a series of alternative materials under realistic conditions before you build the first physical prototype. The impacts of polymer alternatives, filler alternatives, additives, recycled content alternatives, etc. can be characterized with a minimal sample of the material and represented accurately with Endurica’s material modeling capabilities. You can see how material property changes play out in your actual part geometry, under actual part loading histories. All without building a single prototype part. The modeling process is simple to automate, enabling much richer explorations of the available design space. Where a purely prototype-based development program may be able to compare two or three alternatives over a six-month period, a simulation-based program can compare several hundred alternatives in the space of a week!
Just because it can be hard to find a sustainable alternative doesn’t mean that they aren’t out there. It is their relative rarity that makes them so valuable. The next crop of winning products will come from those who can quickly and reliably navigate durability.